mod_rewrite and GoDaddy

Question

I really have only a fair idea of what I am doing. Sorry.

This is what I did to rewrite URLs like these:

http://example.com/foo/bar/news/1-category-name/2-item-name
http://example.com/foo/bar/news/1-category-name

into these:

http://example.com/foo/bar/news.php?newsID=2
http://example.com/foo/bar/news-categories.php?categID=1

respectively

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteBase /foo/bar
  RewriteRule ^news\/([^\/]+)/([0-9]+)-([^\/]+)$   news.php?newsID=$3
  RewriteRule ^news\/([0-9]+)-([^\/]+)$            news-categories.php?categID=$1
</IfModule>

But whenever I try this URL:

http://example.com/foo/bar/news/16-news-category-1/11-title

It always returns a 404 error:

The requested URL /foo/bar/news.html/16-news-category-1/11-title was not found on this server

Why is it trying to find news.html? What am I doing wrong?

I don't know if this is relevant but example.com is virtual (I really don't know the term). The actual files can also be accessed via http://real-domain.com/qux/. So you'd do http://real-domain.com/qux/foo/bar/news/1-category-name/2-item-name to get to 2-item-name.

Does it also help to say that this script actually runs on my development machine?

Development:
   PHP v5.3.5
   Apache v2.2

Live:
   PHP v5.3.6
   Apache v2.2

Answer 1

You this code in your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+)-([a-z\-]+)-([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)-([a-z\-]+)(\/?)$ /news.php?newsID=$4 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+)-([a-z\-]+)/([0-9]+)-([a-z\-]+)(\/?)$ /news.php?newsID=$3 [L,NC]

RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+)-([a-z\-]+)-([0-9]+)(\/?)$ /news-categories.php?categID=$1 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+)-([a-z\-]+)(\/?)$ /news-categories.php?categID=$1 [L,NC]

so when someone goes to:

news/11-category-12 or
news/11-category-12/ or
news/11-category or
news/11-category/

it goes to: news-categories.php?categID=11

and when someone goes to:

news/11-category-12/1-title or
news/11-category-12/1-title/ or
news/11-category/1-title or
news/11-category/1-title/

it goes to: news.php?newsID=1

Also, make sure the .htaccess is at the root of the public_html folder as well of news.php and news-categories.php